Best Urban Park in USA

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kman
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Best Urban Park in USA

Post by kman »

It really is a very lovely park...

http://www.10best.com/awards/travel/best-city-park/
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by flyingember »

kman wrote:It really is a very lovely park...

http://www.10best.com/awards/travel/best-city-park/
It being which one of the 10 listed?
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by brewcrew1000 »

How can you have like 5 parks in Texas/OK on this list, most of the people in Dallas and Houston don't use parks because there to fat and its to hot. Surely there are nicer urban parks in Minneapolis, Seattle, SF, etc
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by flyingember »

I have been to the parks on the list in St. Louis, Houston and Boston. They're all equally good in different ways. Discovery Green is a great model for a small urban park nationwide. Both in Houston made KC's park use look like nothing. I've walked into empty neighborhood parks in KC on a Saturday while Discovery Green was busy at 3pm on a weekday. Their bayou biking trail was busier than I have ever seen the trolley track trail.

My guess is geography plays a big part of which cities put efforts into their urban parks and which ones don't. Your Midwestern parks are outdoor focal points for the city because that's where you traditionally went to get outside. The ones listed in the east also served that purpose.

There's nothing on the list next to any mountain range or any long season beach city. The three cities on the list with any sort of waterfront are all northern where you don't go to the water 8 months of the year. They're also ports where you didn't go to the waterfront. Of your list, Minneapolis has lots of outdoor lakes and snow sports, San Francisco and Seattle are within easy reach of outdoor hiking.

Maybe you can argue over adding more parks, there's doubtless enough to make a good list of 20, but there's a reason this list came out the way it did.
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by shinatoo »

Forest Park is deserving of it's ranking. Great place and well used. One of the good thing that St. Louis does.
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by brewcrew1000 »

I call shenanigans on this list, i looked at a bunch of other lists on best city parks and the one in OKC, Dallas and 2 in Houston don't even show up anywhere. The only sunbelt park to really come up a lot was Encanto Park in Phx
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by brewcrew1000 »

Wonder if this is just one of those skewed polls where the list came out of Texas or something i still have a hard time believing a park in Texas is better than something in SF. Where is Balboa Park?
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

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warwickland
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by warwickland »

for a city that made so many urban planning mistakes, at first glance forest park is sort of a miracle. however, there are several really great parks, such as tower grove, carondelet, and francis park (which reminds me of loose park in kansas city), and a boatload of nice smaller, well connected neighborhood parks (like benton, lafayette, etc etc) that also get used quite heavily.

i am fortunate enough to be able to easily walk to forest park, and spend at least a couple days a week there, if not more. however, i encourage visitors to also check out the other parks, too. tower grove park, for instance, is practically a mini forest park with the botanical gardens attached.
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by WSPanic »

I had a chance to visit Brooklyn Bridge Park this year. I thought it was great, too.
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by Highlander »

kman wrote:It really is a very lovely park...

http://www.10best.com/awards/travel/best-city-park/
I like Forest Park in St Louis. It deserves to be high on the list although it maybe not #1 in my eyes (I would put Golden Gate Park in SF squarely in that spot although it is a bit more peripheral than Forest Park). Otherwise, that is a VERY LAME list. The two parks in Houston are underwhelming to say the least and not even among the better urban parks in the city - Memorial and Herman are better and have way more diverse things to do. Neither of those parks would make my top 100 let alone top 10. The South Platte Riverway in Denver puts Buffalo Bayou in Houston to shame and, frankly, I would rather spend time on the Liberty Memorial Promenade isolated as it is than Discovery Green.

2 so-so parks in Houston and the many notable omissions on that list make it less than credible - what about Grant Park in Chicago? City Park in Denver? Mill Ruins Park/Stone Arch Bridge in Minneapolis.

KC parks indeed are not well attended. They are poorly located and poorly situated. Penn Valley Park is surrounded by anti pedestrian barriers in nearly all directions. Swope Park is an underused gem that got left behind as affluence departed the area and it may be decades if not a century before that park becomes what it could be in KC. Ilus Davis Park is on the wrong side of downtown. I would love to see an urban park on top of a capped south loop just south of the P&L district. That would be pretty awesome.
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warwickland
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by warwickland »

I can't speak to the rest of the KC park system, anymore, but Penn Valley just needs a good polishing and building program, and it would be great. Mow the grass more, fix some of the slopes, for god sakes build more sidewalks and walking paths, trash cans, lighting, build some outdoor structures, picnic areas, and do some prairie or oak savanna restoration (they are doing a lot of controlled burns to re-create oak savannas on the southwest side of forest park on the edge of kennedy forest, it looks great). Forest Park was practically rebuilt in only 10 years (and is still being improved), Penn Valley won't take 100 years.

KC has the resources, just make it a regional priority.
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warwickland
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by warwickland »

swope park would make a great arboretum/urban park hybrid, like the missouri botanical gardens arboretum/shaw nature reserve over here in gray summit. build up part of the park like an urban park with a lot more spit and polish, and then manage the less used side like an arboretum.

again, like penn valley park, i remember there being a mind boggling lack of walking paths and sidewalks in swope. why even have the park, then? there are these huge expanses of brushhogged grass that look unusuable and hot. a lot of that needs to be naturalized, in my opinion, with nice walking paths snaked in.

edit: looks like they did drop some sidewalks in, add more! and for god's sake, plant trees where you need trees....

Image

shaw nature reserve^
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by TheBigChuckbowski »

It's kind of crazy to me that KC doesn't have a botanical garden in the city. Perhaps Powell Gardens would be interested in having an urban outpost.
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warwickland
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Re: Best Urban Park in USA

Post by warwickland »

TheBigChuckbowski wrote:It's kind of crazy to me that KC doesn't have a botanical garden in the city. Perhaps Powell Gardens would be interested in having an urban outpost.
i think that would be ideal, and it's not like they would need a lot of space. MOBOT already is here in-state to provide a workable inner urban/rural model...swope park would be a realistic location, even though something more urban would be better since i feel like swope is sort of out there. i don't know how cooperative/protective these KC institutions are, but they could easily work together.

i notice that they call it "kansas citys botanical garden," but it always seemed way far out there on the hot prairie so that sounds absurd. i may have visited once? carving out an urban location seems like a no-brainer. maybe they could make something work in penn valley...something on that northwest side where the ball fields are and the topography is more tame.
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